In a world dominated by sleek no-code builders and user-friendly platforms like WordPress and Webflow, it’s easy to overlook Drupal. It doesn’t market itself with flashy templates or drag-and-drop simplicity. It’s complex. It requires expertise. And yet, for organizations with certain specific and feature-rich needs, it’s exactly the right choice.
This post isn’t for everyone. It’s for the organizations juggling complex content workflows, multiple user roles, security compliance, and enterprise-level scalability. It’s also for the teams weighing whether their next CMS investment should go toward something plug-and-play or something with power under the hood.
Let’s make the case for Drupal.
When Drupal Makes Sense
Drupal isn’t the right choice for every website; but when it’s right, it’s unbeatable. Here are the kinds of projects where Drupal truly shines:
1. Complex Content Structures
If your content isn’t just blog posts and landing pages, but instead includes deeply nested categories, multiple content types, taxonomies, and relationships between them, Drupal was built for this. Its core content modeling capabilities (Content Types, Views, Paragraphs, Taxonomies) are far more powerful than most CMS platforms offer out of the box.
2. Multiple Roles and Permissions
Organizations that need sophisticated user permissioning (think universities, government entities, or membership-based associations) benefit from Drupal’s granular access control. Editors, moderators, reviewers, and admins can all have distinct workflows tailored to their needs.
3. Security and Compliance Requirements
Drupal has a proven track record of being secure and is a preferred CMS for many government websites. With an active security team and modules vetted through rigorous standards, it’s trusted where others often fall short.
4. Scalability
Whether it’s supporting multilingual content, managing tens of thousands of pages, or integrating with enterprise systems like CRMs, marketing platforms, or custom APIs; Drupal handles scale with ease.
5. Custom Workflows
Need to build a publishing workflow with multiple review gates and approval chains? Drupal’s Workflow and Content Moderation modules are flexible and powerful, making it possible to model even the most intricate editorial processes.
The Real X-Factor: Your Developers
But here’s the catch (it’s a big one and where most Drupal projects go sideways):
Drupal doesn’t succeed or fail based on the platform. It succeeds or fails based on the team implementing it.
Hiring a developer who can simply “make the design work” isn’t enough. Drupal’s architecture is flexible, but that flexibility demands forethought. Strategic implementation, done early, can mean the difference between a CMS that grows with you and one that collapses under its own weight.
An experienced Drupal developer thinks beyond pixels:
- They spend extra time crafting an admin experience that enhances your CMS
- They design content models that reflect your organization’s structure and needs.
- They implement modules in ways that keep the site performant and maintainable.
- They understand Drupal’s out-of-the-box capabilities and don’t strap on custom code or extra modules where it isn’t necessary
- They align user roles and workflows with real business processes.
- They ask, “How will this scale?” instead of just “How can I build this?”
You wouldn’t hand a scalpel to someone who’s only watched surgery videos on YouTube. Drupal is the same, powerful in the right hands, risky in the wrong ones.
Final Thoughts
If your site needs are straightforward (basic marketing pages and a few forms) Drupal is probably more than you need. But if you’re managing complexity at scale, Drupal isn’t just a good option, it might be the best one.
And when you do choose it, make sure you’re not just hiring someone who knows Drupal. Hire someone who knows how to think in Drupal. I haven’t finished it just yet, but we will publish a blog post on how to evaluate Drupal vendors in the near future. Sign up for our blog updates to get an email when it comes out.
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With more than a decade of agency and in-house experience, Ben is a seasoned veteran of the marketing world and leads YMC’s marketing strategy efforts. From project management to brand marketing, Ben’s depth of experience has helped him develop a well-rounded and detail-oriented approach to solving even the most complex marketing and brand challenges. Most recently, Ben served as the Director of Brand Operations & Strategy for Bonterra – the world’s second largest and fastest growing social good technology company.
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